


Tiny Changes

by Glinda



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angels vs. Demons, Books, Dancing, Friendship, Genderfluid Character, Gift Giving, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Hurt/Comfort, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Other, Plague, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-09-26 09:03:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 4,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20387155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: While they're alive, they'll make tiny changes to Earth





	1. The Modern Leper

**Author's Note:**

> Having loved the book for years, I finally got round to watching the series last weekend and had a lot of feelings about it. The other thing I was doing last weekend was listening to Tiny Changes which is the 10th anniversary version of Frightened Rabbit's _Midnight Organ Fight_ as covered by various bands they toured/are friends with. I decided to write a series of drabbles inspired by each song on the album to get my feelings out. Obviously some of them got carried away and could be fics in their own right, but I feel like they all sort of tie together even if they are a little out of order chronologically...
> 
> (If you decide to listen along to the album in either version with this fic, then content warnings for swearing, pejorative language, heartbreak, wrestling with religion, mental issues and suicidal ideation.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You should sit with me and we'll start again  
And you can tell me all about what you did today

The work tends to take them into high places. (High and stinking, Crowley will mockingly comment, only to be surprised by Aziraphale’s wry agreement.) Most of the tempting and divine inspiration that their respective bosses demand of them, is visited upon the new elites, those with power and influence. 

Their best work, the miracles and the curses that they both feel best represents what they ought to be doing on earth, what they were put there for, is in so-called low places. Among the despised and the lost, the sick and the outcast, and never thinking too hard about why their respective priorities are so close to each other and so distant from their head offices. 

They run into each other in both kinds of places, both kinds of work driving them into each other’s company and the welcome embrace of alcohol. The plagues and pestilences can’t touch them – not for long at least – but the greed and corruption certainly leave them feeling tarnished. Instead they drink to human achievements – literacy and art certainly, but also plumbing and antibiotics and vaccinations – and marvel at the sheer heart-stopping grace and evil that humans with their imaginations are capable of by themselves.


	2. Good Arms Vs Bad Arms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When they reach out, don't touch them, don't touch them

Crowley tells himself that this is the last time. That next time he won’t come sweeping in and rescue Aziraphale from his latest deadly tangle. Leave him to be discorporated or at least disappointed when one of his precious human favourites fails to rescue him. 

Sometimes he even tells Aziraphale that, just to see him look chastened, to make him look up through his lashes all coquettish and hopeful. 

He always weakens though, because that moment, when he sweeps in and Aziraphale looks surprised and relieved; there’s a moment of unguarded delight written on his face, that makes everything worthwhile.


	3. The Twist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the night, I can be who you like  
And I'll quietly leave before it gets light

One of Crowley’s favourite things about the 20th Century is the dancing. After centuries of courtly dancing and formal rules about where to move and how close to stand, humans have apparently remembered one of the main points of dancing. A socially acceptable excuse to get as close as possible another human being in public. 

Crowley loves to dance. He embraces each new craze with full-throated enthusiasm. The press of human bodies; the thump of bass in his chest. 

He absolutely does not think about Aziraphale learning the Gavotte, or about why Aziraphale refuses to dance (with Crowley) any more.


	4. Fast Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's get paralysed down both sides  
Snake hips, red city kiss  
And your black eyes roll back

When they’re together, time seems to fall out of sync, to speed up and slow down in a way that thoroughly unsettles Aziraphale. 

Sometimes he thinks that’s why they drink so much together, so they can both pretend it’s just the alcohol that stretches the minutes out like taffy and causes evenings and weeks to pass in a rapid blur. 

(Together they move through time like humans do; not that they realise it.)

They go too fast. 

He loves it but it scares him too, because he knows that one day they’ll have to stop and that scares him more.


	5. I Feel Better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I left our house without a clue  
And left New York City, girl, without you

It’s been too long since he was last on this side of the Atlantic and he’s missed it. 

As with so many of his re-locations over the millennia, he came for a temptation and stayed for the culture. New York has a vibe to it, a certain frisson of danger that he loves and so much sin for him to take credit for as a bonus. He trails temptations and inspiration behind him like confetti.

Mostly though he wanders the streets of Greenwich Village and SoHo, drifting between art shows and artists squats – he frequents the Factory and CBGBs just enough that people recognise his face but not so often that they learn his name – and determinedly not comparing them to their London namesakes. 

Nonetheless he finds himself in old bookshops, browsing volumes, searching endlessly for something. He knows what he’s been looking for when he finds it. Unfortunately the sight of it also prises open the lock box – not the one where he keeps Aziraphale’s reluctant, dangerous gift – where he’s buried all his feelings and presents them to him in all their cruel honesty.

The bookseller asks if he’s alright, and he brushes it off as homesickness. (A visceral certainty that he’s in the wrong bookshop.) It’s closer to the truth than he’d like, because when he wills himself home, it’s not to his Manhattan loft or even his Mayfair penthouse, but instead he finds himself in a bookshop in the other Soho. 

Aziraphale isn’t in, but his presence infuses the place and Crowley breathes it in gladly. Carefully he tucks his treasure into a pile of recently arrived books where Aziraphale will find it. 

(He’ll know it was Crowley but he won’t be able to prove it was him. Plausible deniability all round.)

It’s good to be home.


	6. Bright Pink Bookmark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *instrumental interlude*

It sticks out of the book awkwardly, vivid and out of place in such a staid old volume. The book itself is incorrectly filed in a pile of unrelated volumes. Part of a series that Aziraphale had been a little obsessed with in the 1850s, and incidentally the one instalment that he doesn’t own, that he’d lost in a strange series of events that are lost in the mists of time, beyond that it had been Crowley’s fault. Crowley had promised to replace it, and then… well 1862 had happened. 

Yet apparently Crowley had indeed replaced it, but unlike with so many of Crowley’s gifts, presented casually and offhandly, this one had been hidden carefully among the more usual consignments. With only the bookmark, in all it’s luminous pink gaudiness, to indicate where and whom it came from.

Aziraphale carefully settles himself down in his favourite armchair to re-read his favourite instalment in the series and for perhaps the first time, allows himself to acknowledge that the warm glow in his chest is less about the book than about the friend who’d given it to him. 

As though not even Crowley could pretend that this wasn’t a particularly loaded gesture.


	7. Old Old Fashioned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We will waltz across the carpet  
1-2-3-2-2-3  
So give me the soft, soft static  
Of the open fire and the shuffle of our feet

There’s no reason that the gramophone in the corner should flip its records over to the second side nor should it be able to change albums without intervention. No clever contraption of wires or levers, nor hybridisation with rather more modern sound systems.

No reason except that Crowley has taken it into his head to teach Aziraphale to waltz, and neither of them wishes to step away from where they are clumsily waltzing back and forth across the floor. Occasionally twirling ineptly, and drunk more on shared laughter than on the bottle of wine they’d shared much earlier that evening.


	8. Keep Yourself Warm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm drunk, I'm drunk  
And you're probably on pills  
If we both got the same diseases  
It's irrelevant, girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got a bit out of control given that it's nearly as long in it's own right as all the rest of the chapters put together. I may have already had a lot of feelings about this song...
> 
> This is the chapter all this story's more esoteric tags and warnings are about. 
> 
> Dialectal explanation: 'to get your hole' is a crude expression for having sex. (It's a song about casual sex and despair, this is not a happy chapter.)

Crowley hates seductions. 

He hadn’t always. Back in the early days of the world, they’d been just another way to cause mischief, quite a fun and occasionally outright joyful. Even as recently as Rome, Crowley and Aziraphale had occasionally competed over souls and a good time had been had by all. 

However, some time in the 14th century – Crowley really hated the 14th century – it had changed, become something grubby and shameful and tiresome. So much unnecessary guilt, shame and hypocrisy. He misses the days when humans revelled in the pleasure and the intimacy, and the truly adventurous and imaginative ways they’d found to have fun without anyone getting pregnant who didn’t want to be. He wants to shake them all by the shoulders and tell them that if it doesn’t feel good for everyone involved they’re not doing it right. That having sex or not should be about what they want to do, not about what they feel they ought to do or not do. 

His latest assignment had been a politician, and he’d actually been looking forward to it, not out of any personal attraction, but out of a decided conviction that the man deserved a good cursing. The rarity of his and hell’s priorities having fallen into alignment was a novel pleasure. 

There’d been meetings and rallies and parties and the whirl and corruption that go along with standing at the intersection of power and greed. It was all so depressingly ordinary and unimaginative. Hedonism with all the joy and pleasure sucked out of it. Yet somehow everything just slides off this guy, not that he doesn’t partake – quite the opposite – but that no matter the debauchery, he gets up in the morning and stands shiny and clean before the cameras, spitting hateful fury out into the world, lying through his teeth. (Crowley double checks with the immortal soul contract guys, that this guy hasn’t already sold his soul.) 

He’s rotten to the core, and by any reasonable set of rules would be terminally hellbound. But human’s go where they think they’re going, not where they ‘deserve’ to go and this guy is ‘righteous’, believing utterly that he is doing God’s work and thus will be forgiven. Thus Crowley’s job is not to tempt his politician, but to open his eyes, to exactly the mundane human evil that he is, and thus deliver him safely into the waiting arms of hell. 

In the end, his work is mostly done in stripping away the yes men and the lawyers from the politician’s side and cursing those he trusts with honesty. Crowley strips away the pretty lies and confronts the man with the truth about who he’s always been, his seduction is really more of a revelation. Crowley often claims that he’s a demon not a monster, but he is terribly tempted to curse his politician with the disease that the man rails with so much hellfire against. However it turns out that he’s already got it, not that you’d notice among all the other sexual diseases he’s riddled with and _purposefully_ spreading about the place - Crowley hasn’t seen a case of tertiary syphilis since the advent of penicillin but he remembers and it’s easy enough to curse the outward symptoms upon this man long after the antibiotics have done their work. After that, the politician needs only the smallest of nudges to instigate his own messy public downfall and satisfyingly drags a couple of his terribly righteous, but equally abhorrent colleagues down with him. 

(Years later, performing a temptation in a Glasgow nightclub, Crowley’ll overhear some lads banter – ‘any hole’s a goal, mate’ – that will cause a flashback of this period so visceral that he’ll projectile vomit all over the speaker without consciously intending to. A great many paths to hell start with that, thinking of people as things.)

Even an ocean apart; countless showers, and one miraculous scouring later, Crowley still feels tainted by proximity to such a festering example of a rotten human soul. Eventually he accepts that there’s only one thing that will make him feel remotely better. 

Crowley curls himself on the chaise longue beside Aziraphale who, apparently still absorbed in his book, carefully rearranges the cushions one-handed for maximum mutual comfort. Crowley’s head settles incidentally in Aziraphale’s lap and in turn, Aziraphale’s hand comes to rest in Crowley’s hair. Thus situated, Crowley finally allows his body to return to it’s genderless baseline state, and also stops restraining the shudders that have been trying to wrack it the whole journey here. He can feel the human virus coursing through his body at accelerated speed, burning out but taking its toll nonetheless. He understands what’s happening, but he hates it nonetheless. For a moment the feel of Aziraphale’s hands, gentle in his hair, only makes him hate it more. The thought of the hundreds of thousands who’ll suffer this without any chance of respite, without even the comfort of a…friend…at the end, makes something in his stomach curdle and roil. He rolls onto his back suddenly dislodging the angel’s hand. 

“I hate this, angel,” he admits.

“It’ll pass,” Aziraphale assures him, putting down his book.

“Like the Plague did,” Crowley asks, unable to help himself.

“Yes,” Aziraphale agrees with a deep sigh, and if Crowley hadn’t been looking at that moment he wouldn’t have seen the shadow pass over his old friend’s face before he continued, “hopefully without the same kind of death toll, but I suspect that…may be a vain hope.”

“It just seems so bloody pointless,” Crowley admits. He gestures vaguely with one hand to encompass the disease itself, the wider human response to it, Heaven and Hell’s respective machinations around it, take your pick.

“Of course it’s pointless,” Aziraphale protests, “it’s not something of either Heaven or Hell, it’s something of Earth, there’s no lesson being taught or learned, no punishment served. Makes it worse somehow.”

“No one to be angry at,” agrees Crowley, so much anger bubbling under both their skins and nothing to turn it upon. 

“No wile to thwart,” Aziraphale ventures softly, and Crowley hears the sadness in his companion’s voice that he knows lurks under his own rage. 

So many centuries, so many plagues, the worst ones were always the ones where neither of them were able to make a difference. Even when they could save a village or two that helped. 

(More than a few village chiefs and town mayors had sold their soul with a song in their heart to keep their people safe from a plague.) 

“Lot’s of divine visitations in local hospitals?” Crowley suggests.

“Perhaps more than the law of averages would suggest, though mostly just the, umm, less celestial forms of visitations,” the silence stretches between them before Aziraphale catches sight of Crowley’s questioning expression, “lot’s of people’s families won’t visit them, and lot’s of other’s chosen families aren’t _allowed_ to visit them.”

Through the longest watches of the night, thinks Crowley, rage passing through him finally, leaving only the deep well of sadness behind it. How many nights, he wonders, how many lonely vigils and how many clinging hands?

“Come on,” Crowley says eventually tugging at Aziraphale’s sleeve, “just until I sweat the stupid thing out. Wouldn’t be the first plague we’ve ridden out like this now would it?”

“541 and 1393,” agrees Aziraphale, “not that I remember much about 1393.” 

“Let’s not speak of 1393, it wasn’t pleasant even for those of us who didn’t narrowly avoid being discorporated by the Plague.” Crowley insists, tugging again at Aziraphale’s sleeve until he relents with a fond smile and divests himself of his coat. 

Aziraphale slides down beside him, drawing a blanket over them both, and in turn Crowley curls himself into the angel and all his comfortingly inhuman warmth.


	9. Extrasupervery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the year, oh, oh!

Oddly enough, in nigh on six millennia of knowing each other, Aziraphale and Crowley haven’t actually seen in very many new year’s eve’s together, regardless of the calendar that has been in force at the time. The rate is significantly higher in this new millennium. This is largely Warlock’s fault. Or more correctly the Dowling’s fault for wanting to go to glamorous embassy New Year’s Eve parties and expecting Nanny Ashtoreth to take care of Warlock. It would of course be terribly rude for Aziraphale to swan off to a party and leave Crowley alone with the boy. (The rest of the household having scarpered to their own parties.) 

However, given that secretly they’d both rather spend the night sitting together on the rather comfortable sofa, drinking a nice malt and heckling Jools Holland, a small and sleepy Warlock has been an excellent excuse to do just that. Sometimes, if they’re feeling particularly adventurous they will sneak out onto the roof of the residence and watch the fireworks.

This is the first year that Warlock has actually managed to stay awake until midnight, mostly by sheer determination as far as Aziraphale can tell, given the way he’s still fighting sleep at 2am.

“Extrasupervery!” Warlock insists.

“Yes,” agrees Crowley, “an extra super very special adventure, so we won’t be telling your parents about sitting on the roof or about staying up after midnight, will we dear? Not if we want to stay up again next year?”

“Brother Francis says I mustn’t tell lies,” Warlock suggests, looking up at Aziraphale slyly. 

“Maybe just this once,” he concedes with a sigh. “Time for all good children to be in bed anyway. Be good for your Nanny to make up for it.” 

And for a wonder, he is, going to sleep, no miracles required.


	10. Poke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But I hate when I feel like this  
And I never hated you

Aziraphale hates it. 

Hates that the world is coming to an end, that no-one in Heaven is listening to him, that he’s losing hope and Crowley seems already to have lost it. 

He hates that he knows exactly how to hurt Crowley; that long familiarity means he knows exactly where all his weak spots are. That when he lashes out wildly he can poke with uncanny accuracy the precise points that will floor his oldest dearest friend. That will provoke him to lash out in turn with all the truths that they never speak aloud. 

It’s all he can do not break down and confess everything to Crowley, to call him back and pull him into his arms, and believe for just a little longer that there’s nothing they can’t overcome together. 

But this is Armageddon, and the time for their games is over.

He tells himself that if Crowley leaves, if he really is set on fleeing, then at least he’ll be safe. That when everything blows over then he can come back. That worse case scenario, they’ll never have to take up arms against each other. 

Aziraphale hates just about everything right now, but he hates himself more.


	11. My Backwards Walk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's nowhere else for me to go  
Except back to you just one last time

He needs a plan. 

Everything will be all right as soon as he has a plan. It doesn’t need to be impressive or even particularly wily; it just needs to be solid. 

Aziraphale’s scared, Crowley gets that, he’s bloody terrified himself, he just needs a plan to drag him out of his inertia and into safety. Enough to walk the two of them back into alignment.

He can’t do this alone. As much as he loves the world, desperately doesn’t want it to end, he loves his angel more. 

Nothing at all matters if he has to do this alone.


	12. Who'd You Kill Now?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who'd you push down the stairs last night?  
I would've liked to have been a part of that

In the aftermath, they go back to Crowley’s flat. Both of them more tired than they’ve been in centuries.

Before they can rest, before they can plan, they have to deal with the mess Ligur and Hastor left behind. Particularly Ligur. Or at least what remains of him. 

Aziraphale does most of the heavy lifting, claiming it’s only fair in the circumstances. 

Crowley hears what he isn’t saying, a confirmation of this thing they share; both the credit and the blame. 

Crowley may have wielded the weapon, but it was Aziraphale that armed him and neither of them are sorry.


	13. Floating in the Forth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'll steer myself through choppy waves  
As manic gulls scream "it's okay"

Crowley’s not entirely sure where he is when he wakes up. On a beach certainly, and from the particular textured grey of the sky he’s still on the same island he went to sleep on. Pebbles rather than sand below him, so probably east coast rather than west coast. It isn’t the first time this has happened; in fact it’s happened often enough in these few months since the Apocalypse hadn’t, that it’s possible he should start to worry about it. 

He looks away from the horizon at the sound of approaching footsteps, to see Aziraphale picking his way across the shifting pebbles towards him, carrying a bundle. The angel doesn’t say anything once he gets there, merely nods in greeting and shakes out his bundle, which reveals itself to be a tartan blanket. Carefully Aziraphale lays the blanket out on the pebbles beside Crowley and then carefully lies down beside him, shifting position a few times before settling with his hands folded under his head as a makeshift pillow. It cannot possibly be comfortable but Aziraphale gives no indication that he is anything but content in his position. 

It was, Crowley muses; probably inevitable that Aziraphale would figure out that something was wrong. Really he should have brought it up himself after the first time, or at least after the second or third time proved it wasn’t a one-off fluke, but that would have involved admitting to himself that there was something wrong. 

“How far did I go this time,” he asks, bracing for whatever reaction it provokes.

“Approximately, 389 miles, that’s the new Queensferry Crossing over there,” Aziraphale tells him like it’s perfectly normal. 

“That’s…” Crowley trails off, unnerved by how much further away he’d gone this time. It’s normally Kent, a couple of times it’s been a very nice beach in North West Wales. At this rate he’ll…

“So I thought it was past time to say something before you ended up in the Outer Hebrides,” Aziraphale interrupts his chain of thought. 

“Practically a miracle that you managed to get a ticket for the Caledonian Sleeper at this short notice as it is,” Crowley replies, still trying to avoid the inevitable. “Do you suppose the Fort William service splits at Crianlarich for Oban like the rest of the trains on the West Highland line? It must do, mustn’t it? For people getting the ferry? Though, given how poor a sailor you are, three hours on a ferry would really be beyond the call of duty…”

“Crowley.” Aziraphale says quietly, stopping him in his tracks. He sounds sad and scared and Crowley hates himself a little. The point of not telling Aziraphale was so that he didn’t worry. He closes his eyes behind his sunglasses for a long moment before he speaks. 

“It’s not as though I’m doing it on purpose,” he says forcing himself to turn enough to see that Aziraphale has also turned his head to look back at him. He’s rewarded with the angel’s wry smile, which he returns, the unspoken acknowledgement that ‘yes that’s what’s so worrying about it’ hanging between them. “And the locations don’t seem to have any special significance. This isn’t even that nice a beach.”

“You seem, more generally, a little, unmoored,” Aziraphale ventures. 

“Some days, it feels like I might float away into space,” he confesses, “that if I don’t hold on tight the whole world will disappear around me.” 

He risks a glance at his companion and is surprised to see not sympathy or even empathy, but simple recognition, that he’s not the only one having nightmares.

“Sometimes,” Aziraphale confesses in turn, “it’s all I can do not to physically cling onto everything that matters to me. On bad days I can’t even leave the bookshop in case it’s not there when I get back.”

It is entirely possible, Crowley muses silently, eyeing the way his companion is knotting his fingers together in his lap, that they’re being rather daft about this. Here he is afraid of dragging Aziraphale down when all _he_ wants is to anchor Crowley beside him. Slowly, he creeps his hand out so that it falls still exactly between them. Gaze still fixed on the clouds; Aziraphale drops his nearest hand down beside Crowley’s on the blanket. It reminds Crowley of that long bus ride back from Lower Tadfield all those months before, their hands slowly creeping closer until they were gently folded together. Except that this time it happens over a few minutes and their fingers when they meet immediately tangle and intertwine. Crowley would feel bad about the way his nails must be digging into Aziraphale’s hand, if he couldn’t feel the way Aziraphale’s own neatly manicured nails are making their own matching indents. 

“It couldn’t be that simple, could it?” Crowley asks doubtfully. 

“Maybe, maybe not, but at least this way,” Aziraphale pauses for a long moment, to take several large unnecessary breathes before continuing, “wherever you go you’ll take me with you.”

There’s so much history between the two of them, so much unsaid and so much they aren’t yet ready to say or to hear, but first and foremost they are friends, and friends lean on each other. Gently Crowley tugs on Aziraphale’s hand, pulling him down to lie beside him. Aziraphale in turn reaches over with his free hand and flicks the edge of the blanket so that it miraculously tucks itself under Crowley cushioning him slightly from the pebbled beach. 

“You pick the beach next time,” he suggests closing his eyes, “preferably not Luskentyre though, bit windy this time of year.”

“Bournemouth has rather better transport links,” Aziraphale muses vaguely, “more shelter from the cliffs.” 

And just like that Crowley hears the waves change and the surface under their blanket gets considerably softer. It’s also somewhat warmer, so possibly if he opens his eyes he’ll discover that they aren’t actually in Dorset. 

They aren’t quite home yet, but wherever they drift next at least it’ll be together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this one was the hardest to write. It's my favourite song on the album, a song that was a light in the darkness through my own mental health struggles. I used to call it the most hopeful song about suicide, because it's a song about _not_ killing yourself. There was a long while there when I thought I'd never be able to listen to that song again, certainly not without crying. (I can, and I do, and that's a different kind of painful.) So this is a story about drifting and about reaching out and finding someone else reaching back for you, because in the end isn't that what we all want? Whether that connection is romantic, platonic, familial or spiritual; to know we're not alone?
> 
> (So if you need to hear it, if you're looking for a sign, this is it: please stay.)


	14. Head Rolls Off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And while I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to earth

Too much messing about, that’s what Adam had called it, and honestly both of them agree with him, it’s just that they are what they are and habits so long established are hard to break. They’ve lived too long among the humans to be able to keep a cool and detached distance. Having fought so hard to save it from deliberate destruction, they can’t go around just letting the humans destroy it by accident. 

It doesn’t matter that they know there’s more to the universe than this, that when the world is gone, something will indeed carry on. The important thing is that this world is home, and there will never be another like it, that without it they would never have known each other or become the people that they now are. The only place where anything they do truly matters, or where ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has any real meaning.

It is not, by a long shot, the best of all possible worlds, but it’s their world and they love it, so they have no choice but to do everything in their power to help it be the best world it can be. Tiny nudges in the right direction.


End file.
